ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could
never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men’s
observing eyes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among
bedclothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he
wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear
they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at
least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous
and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence
of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious
terror, some scission in the continuity of man’s experience, some
wilful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on
the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as
the defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should break the mould
of their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said)
when the winter changed the time of its appearance. The like might
befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal
his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might
yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch;
ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him: if, for
instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of
his victim; or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen
invade him from all sides. These things he feared; and, in a sense,
these things might be called the hands of God reached forth against
sin. But about God himself he was at ease; his act was doubtless
exceptional, but so were his excuses, which God knew; it was there, and
not among men, that he felt sure of justice.
When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind
him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite
dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing-cases and
incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he beheld
himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage; many pictures,
framed and unframed, standing, with their faces to the wall; a fine
Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with
tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by great good
fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, and this
concealed him from the neighbors. Here, then, Markheim drew in a
packing-case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys. It
was a long business, for there were many; and it was irksome, besides;
for, after all, there might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on
the wing. But the closeness of the occupation sobered him. With the
tail of his eye he saw the door—even glanced at it from time to time
directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good estate
of his defences. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the
street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the
notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and the voices of
many children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable
was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it
smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his mind was thronged with
answerable ideas and images; church-going children and the pealing of
the high organ; children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on
the brambly common, kite-fliers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky;
and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the
somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson
(which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs,
and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel.
And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to his
feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood, went
over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted
the stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon the
knob, and the lock clicked, and the door opened.
Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not, whether the
dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or some
chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows.
But when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room,
looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and
then withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke
loose from his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the
visitant returned.
“Did you call me?” he asked, pleasantly, and with that he entered the
room and closed the door behind him.
Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there was a
film upon his sight, but the outlines of the new-comer seemed to change
and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light of the
shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he
bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror,
there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the
earth and not of God.
And yet the creature had a strange air of the commonplace, as he stood
looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added: “You are looking
for the money, I believe?” it was in the tones of every-day politeness.
Markheim made no answer.
“I should warn you,” resumed the other, “that the maid has left her
sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be
found in this house, I need not describe to him the consequences.”
“You know me?” cried the murderer.
The visitor smiled. “You have long been a favorite of mine,” he said;
“and I have long observed and often sought to help you.”
“What are you?” cried Markheim: “the devil?”
“What I may be,” returned the other, “cannot affect the service I
propose to render you.”
“It can,” cried Markheim; “it does! Be helped by you? No, never; not by
you! You do not know me yet; thank God, you do not know me!”
“I know you,” replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity or
rather firmness. “I know you to the soul.”
“Know me!” cried Markheim. “Who can do so? My life is but a travesty
and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all
men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them.
You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and
muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control—if you could see
their faces, they would be altogether different, they would shine out
for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; my self is more overlaid;
my excuse is known to me and God. But, had I the time, I could disclose
myself.”
“To me?” inquired the visitant.
“To you before all,” returned the murderer. “I supposed you were
intelligent. I thought—since you exist—you would prove a reader of
the heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of
it; my acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants
have dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother—the
giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can
you not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to
me? Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never
blurred by any wilful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can
you not read me for a thing that surely must be common as humanity—the
unwilling sinner?”
“All this is very feelingly expressed,” was the reply, “but it regards
me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care
not in the least by what compulsion you may have been dragged away,
so as you are but carried in the right direction. But time flies; the
servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures
on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember,
it is as if the gallows itself was striding towards you through the
Christmas streets! Shall I help you; I, who know all? Shall I tell you
where to find the money?”
“For what price?” asked Markheim.
“I offer you the service for a Christmas gift,” returned the other.
Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph.
“No,” said he, “I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of
thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should
find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing
to commit myself to evil.”
“I have no objection to a death-bed repentance,” observed the visitant.
“Because you disbelieve their efficacy!” Markheim cried.
“I do not say so,” returned the other; “but I look on these things from
a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. The man
has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under color of religion,
or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak
compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his deliverance,
he can add but one act of service—to repent, to die smiling, and thus
to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my surviving
followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please
yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply,
spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall
and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort,
that you will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your
conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God. I came but now from
such a death-bed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening
to the man’s last words: and when I looked into that face, which had
been set as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope.”
“And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?” asked Markheim. “Do you
think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and
sin, and, at last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought.
Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because you find
me with red hands that you presume such baseness? and is this crime of
murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of good?”
“Murder is to me no special category,” replied the other. “All sins
are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving
mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and
feeding on each other’s lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their
acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my
eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on
a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such
a murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues
also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes
for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not
in action but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act,
whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling
cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the
rarest virtues. And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but
because you are Markheim, that I offered to forward your escape.”
“I will lay my heart open to you,” answered Markheim. “This crime on
which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many
lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been
driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty,
driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these
temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But to-day,
and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches—both the power
and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor
in the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents
of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past;
something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of
the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble
books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my
life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of
destination.”
“You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?” remarked
the visitor; “and there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some
thousands?”
“Ah,” said Markheim, “but this time I have a sure thing.”
“This time, again, you will lose,” replied the visitor quietly.
“Ah, but I keep back the half!” cried Markheim.
“That also you will lose,” said the other.
The sweat started upon Markheim’s brow. “Well, then, what matter?” he
exclaimed. “Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty, shall
one part of me, and that the worst, continue until the end to override
the better? Evil and good run strong in me, haling me both ways. I
do not love the one thing, I love all. I can conceive great deeds,
renunciations, martyrdoms; and though I be fallen to such a crime as
murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows
their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I
love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth
but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life,
and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the
mind? Not so; good, also, is a spring of acts.”
But the visitant raised his finger. “For six-and-thirty years that you
have been in this world,” said he, “through many changes of fortune and
varieties of humor, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years
ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would
have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any
cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil?—five years from now
I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward, lies your way; nor
can anything but death avail to stop you.”
“It is true,” Markheim said huskily, “I have in some degree complied
with evil. But it is so with all: the very saints, in the mere
exercise of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their
surroundings.”
“I will propound to you one simple question,” said the other; “and as
you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown
in many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so; and at any
account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in
any one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with
your own conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?”
“In any one?” repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration.
“No,” he added, with despair, “in none! I have gone down in all.”
“Then,” said the visitor, “content yourself with what you are, for
you will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are
irrevocably written down.”
Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it was the visitor
who first broke the silence. “That being so,” he said, “shall I show
you the money?”
“And grace?” cried Markheim.
“Have you not tried it?” returned the other. “Two or three years ago,
did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, and was not your
voice the loudest in the hymn?”
“It is true,” said Markheim; “and I see clearly what remains for me by
way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul; my eyes are
opened, and I behold myself at last for what I am.”
At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang through the house;
and the visitant, as though this were some concerted signal for which
he had been waiting, changed at once in his demeanor.
“The maid!” he cried. “She has returned, as I forewarned you, and there
is now before you one more difficult passage. Her master, you must
say, is ill; you must let her in, with an assured but rather serious
countenance—no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you success! Once
the girl within, and the door closed, the same dexterity that has
already rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last danger in
your path. Thenceforward you have the whole evening—the whole night,
if needful—to ransack the treasures of the house and to make good your
safety. This is help that comes to you with the mask of danger. Up!” he
cried: “up, friend; your life hangs trembling in the scales: up, and
act!”
Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. “If I be condemned to evil
acts,” he said, “there is still one door of freedom open—I can cease
from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I
be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet,
by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love
of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it be! But I have
still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment,
you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage.”
The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely
change: they brightened and softened with a tender triumph; and, even
as they brightened, faded and dislimned. But Markheim did not pause to
watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went
downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly
before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream,
random as chance-medley—a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed
it, tempted him no longer; but on the further side he perceived a quiet
haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into the
shop, where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely
silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he stood
gazing. And then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamor.
He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.
“You had better go for the police,” said he: “I have killed your
master.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] G. Stanley Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. II.
[2] _Ibid._
[3] From “The First Christmas Tree,” by Henry Van Dyke. Copyright,
1897, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[4] From “Evening Tales,” by Joel Chandler Harris. Copyright, 1893, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[5] From “Sonny, a Christmas Guest,” by Ruth McEnery Stuart. Copyright,
1896, by The Century Co. Reprinted by special permission.
[6] De Quincey, “Letters to a Young Man.”
[7] From “Christmas Eve on Lonesome,” by John Fox, Jr. Copyright, 1904,
by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[8] From Volume VI of the Biographical Edition of the Complete Works of
James Whitcomb Riley, copyright, 1913. Used by special permission of
the publishers, the Bobbs-Merrill Company.
[9] From “Under the Deodars,” by Rudyard Kipling. Copyright, 1899, by
Rudyard Kipling. Reprinted by special permission of Doubleday, Page and
Company.
[10] From “The Works of Edgar Allan Poe,” published by Charles
Scribner’s Sons.
[11] From “Whirligigs,” by O. Henry. Copyright, 1910, by Doubleday,
Page & Company. Reprinted by special permission of Doubleday, Page &
Company.
[12] From “College Years,” by Ralph D. Paine. Copyright, 1909, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[13] From “Gallegher and Other Stories,” by Richard Harding Davis.
Copyright, 1891, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[14] Pronounced Cal-e-_va_-ras.
[15] From “The Jumping Frog and Other Sketches,” by Mark Twain.
Copyright, 1903, by Harper & Bros.
[16] From “The Lady or the Tiger?” by Frank R. Stockton. Copyright,
1886, by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright, 1914, by Marie Louise and
Frances A. Stockton.
[17] From “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” by Francis Bret Harte. Copyright,
1906, by Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted by special arrangement
with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers of Bret
Harte’s works.
[18] From “A New England Nun and Other Stories,” by Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman. Copyright, 1891, by Harper & Bros. Reprinted by special
permission.
[19] From “In Ole Virginia,” by Thomas Nelson Page. Copyright, 1887, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[20] From “Old Creole Days,” by George W. Cable. Copyright, 1890, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[21] From “Love in Old Cloathes and Other Stories,” by H. C. Bunner.
Copyright, 1896, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[22] From “The Inn of Tranquillity,” by John Galsworthy. Copyright,
1912, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[23] From _Scribner’s Magazine_. August, 1914.
[24] From “The Militants,” by Mary R. S. Andrews. Copyright, 1907, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[25] From “The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables,” by Robert Louis
Stevenson, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
End of Project Gutenberg's Short Stories for High Schools, by Various